Rahul Desai
The problem isn’t that dentistry is treated as a personality disorder; it’s that these characters – and the stories they occupy – are about as compact as the rotten teeth they pull out.
Tooth Pari is another symptom of the Bollywood-Bong syndrome, completing the 2023 trilogy along with the screechy Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway and the clueless Mrs Undercover.
But most of Tooth Pari feels like an unsupervised root canal because of its uneven tone, flimsy writing, amateur acting and staging. The vampire lair below looks like Tim Burton’s Batman raided a video-game parlour.
The mythmaking is amusing at times, fuelled by the dissonance between what the show thinks it is and what it actually looks like. It fails at such a technical level – where the rhythm of every scene exists in isolation to the next – that sitting through Tooth Pari becomes an endurance exercise.
The performances are an extension of this mess. I get that vampires are not human, but the brief to Tanya Maniktala seems to be “spirited but robotic”. Much like in Gangubai Kathiawadi, Shantanu Maheshwari looks frightfully young, though I suspect he might have had more to work with had he not been written as a mousy dentist.
The reason I’m doubly upset with a series like Tooth Pari is because it’s a genre killer of sorts.